在网站上看到的一段有关陶瓷的建议
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感觉比较好分享给大家
Some Advice
Since foreign graduate students cost twice as much, and frequently produce research papers of lower quality than native students, it is critical that applications for graduate study address these two issues. From a research advisor's perspective, a foreign student needs to be outstanding and exceptional to justify the extra financial and time cost (all those extra paper reviews take time) of admitting a foreign student.
There are several things you can do to improve your chances of gaining admission. Contacting a faculty member is critical, since they make decisions on who is admitted. However, when contacting a faculty member, there are several key points to remember:
1. English expression must be perfect. Consider the following excerpt from an email I received from a prospective student:
I did my undergraduate studies at {XXX} University, one of China's the most famous universities with a history 100 years, and kept on ranking in the upper 10 percent among 92 students in the department.
Just in this one sentence there are at least four grammar and expression errors. This clearly says to me that the student does not have a firm command of English expression, and their papers will definitely need multiple reviews. As a Professor I want to bring in students who will make less work for me, not more.
2. Show a clear and sincere interest in the faculty's research area. Faculty have very specialized research interests, and are looking for students with demonstrated capacity to perform excellent research in their specialty. If you approach a faculty member and say that you want to perform research in an area outside their specialty, they will show little interest. Additionally, faculty often indicate research interests that are very broad. I personally state that I have a research interest in "Software Engineering." However, this is a very broad field. My more specific interest is in software evolution and software bug prediction. Hence, if you send me email stating you're interested in Software Engineering, that is much less interesting to me than an email stating you're interested in software bug prediction or software evolution.
Of course, just listing a few buzzwords doesn't impress much either. Some emails I receive appear to be form letters, with a fill-in space for research interest buzzwords. These are pretty easy to spot, and don't demonstrate any sincere interest in performing research in that field. If you want to rise above the crowd, you will identify potentially interesting faculty, then go and read one or two of their recent papers. This will give you a very good idea of their research specialty (you may find you don't like it!) and will allow you to write a customized letter that speaks directly to that faculty's current research interests.
Here's another example email I received:
Checking into the web site, I have found that your research areas cater to my type of research interests.
I interpreted this as follows. First, the student doesn't know or care what research they want to perform, since they didn't state their research interests. This is a red flag, since such a student might be accepted into the program, chew up a year of grant support, and then discover they are really interested in some other research area and switch to another research group. While students often do switch research areas as their interests mature, as a Professor I look to reduce the possibility of this happening, since this is disruptive to a research agenda.
Second, the prospective student obviously didn't do their homework. They didn't bother to read my web site enough to determine my current research interests.
Right now you may be thinking, "Reading all these papers takes too much time, especially for a preliminary email." This is true, it does take more time to really understand the research agenda of a faculty member. However, by applying for graduate school, you are asking a professor to make a large financial and time investment. My attitude as a faculty member is, "Why should I admit a prospective student who is not willing to spend 1-2 hours to determine my current research interests?" On the flip side, you are looking to make a commitment to a particular research area, and this can have significant impact on your career and happiness. Doesn't it make sense to have a good idea of what you're getting into?
3. Use an ASCII-representable name in your email if your native language is ideographic. A lot of spam email has "from" addresses that are not ASCII. Many faculty receive over 100 spam email messages a day. To ensure your message isn't ignored as spam, use an informative Subject line, and an ASCII From address.
4. Check to see how many students the professor currently has. Research groups are hard to scale up. Generally, faculty members do not like to have more than 3-10 students. If a faculty member has a lot of students already, even if you're Albert Einstein they still might not be interested.
补充内容 (2014-10-19 10:57):
补充是在UC davis的一个professor的个人主页里看到的，具体网站已经找不到了
Some Advice
Since foreign graduate students cost twice as much, and frequently produce research papers of lower quality than native students, it is critical that applications for graduate study address these two issues. From a research advisor's perspective, a foreign student needs to be outstanding and exceptional to justify the extra financial and time cost (all those extra paper reviews take time) of admitting a foreign student.
There are several things you can do to improve your chances of gaining admission. Contacting a faculty member is critical, since they make decisions on who is admitted. However, when contacting a faculty member, there are several key points to remember:
1. English expression must be perfect. Consider the following excerpt from an email I received from a prospective student:
I did my undergraduate studies at {XXX} University, one of China's the most famous universities with a history 100 years, and kept on ranking in the upper 10 percent among 92 students in the department.
Just in this one sentence there are at least four grammar and expression errors. This clearly says to me that the student does not have a firm command of English expression, and their papers will definitely need multiple reviews. As a Professor I want to bring in students who will make less work for me, not more.
2. Show a clear and sincere interest in the faculty's research area. Faculty have very specialized research interests, and are looking for students with demonstrated capacity to perform excellent research in their specialty. If you approach a faculty member and say that you want to perform research in an area outside their specialty, they will show little interest. Additionally, faculty often indicate research interests that are very broad. I personally state that I have a research interest in "Software Engineering." However, this is a very broad field. My more specific interest is in software evolution and software bug prediction. Hence, if you send me email stating you're interested in Software Engineering, that is much less interesting to me than an email stating you're interested in software bug prediction or software evolution.
Of course, just listing a few buzzwords doesn't impress much either. Some emails I receive appear to be form letters, with a fill-in space for research interest buzzwords. These are pretty easy to spot, and don't demonstrate any sincere interest in performing research in that field. If you want to rise above the crowd, you will identify potentially interesting faculty, then go and read one or two of their recent papers. This will give you a very good idea of their research specialty (you may find you don't like it!) and will allow you to write a customized letter that speaks directly to that faculty's current research interests.
Here's another example email I received:
Checking into the web site, I have found that your research areas cater to my type of research interests.
I interpreted this as follows. First, the student doesn't know or care what research they want to perform, since they didn't state their research interests. This is a red flag, since such a student might be accepted into the program, chew up a year of grant support, and then discover they are really interested in some other research area and switch to another research group. While students often do switch research areas as their interests mature, as a Professor I look to reduce the possibility of this happening, since this is disruptive to a research agenda.
Second, the prospective student obviously didn't do their homework. They didn't bother to read my web site enough to determine my current research interests.
Right now you may be thinking, "Reading all these papers takes too much time, especially for a preliminary email." This is true, it does take more time to really understand the research agenda of a faculty member. However, by applying for graduate school, you are asking a professor to make a large financial and time investment. My attitude as a faculty member is, "Why should I admit a prospective student who is not willing to spend 1-2 hours to determine my current research interests?" On the flip side, you are looking to make a commitment to a particular research area, and this can have significant impact on your career and happiness. Doesn't it make sense to have a good idea of what you're getting into?
3. Use an ASCII-representable name in your email if your native language is ideographic. A lot of spam email has "from" addresses that are not ASCII. Many faculty receive over 100 spam email messages a day. To ensure your message isn't ignored as spam, use an informative Subject line, and an ASCII From address.
4. Check to see how many students the professor currently has. Research groups are hard to scale up. Generally, faculty members do not like to have more than 3-10 students. If a faculty member has a lot of students already, even if you're Albert Einstein they still might not be interested.
补充内容 (2014-10-19 10:57):
补充是在UC davis的一个professor的个人主页里看到的，具体网站已经找不到了
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